All posts in “Cloud”

In this post I'm talking about how you can use something called secureValue, or secure environment variables, with your Azure Container Instance. Given the sensitive nature of some data you put into the variables, it is a good idea to understand different ways to protect some of that data - with secure environment variables you can hide the values from the UI and API calls to the ACI, and from the Azure Portal. BackgroundRunning your applications in the cloud has become increasingly popular. Migrating your .NET applications to .NET Core and hosting them as Docker images in the cloud is…

Updated 2018-03-23: With the latest version of the CLI the get-versions command has been replaced with get-upgrades in regards to seeing what upgrades are available. Thanks to my buddy Thorsten for the heads up. The details below has been updated to accomodate these changes. While working a lot with AKS and Kubernetes the last couple of months, I've found it to be a pretty slick experience using the CLI even if it still has some room for improvement. The question of how to upgrade Kubernetes running in an Azure AKS cluster came up a few times both offline and online,…

This article will talk a little bit about how to get started with the new Azure Container Services (AKS). In recent months I've put quite some efforts into AKS and put it through the ring of fire and rigorous tests. So far, so good. With my R&D I've found some gotchas and had to figure quite some things out, but in the end the setup and configuration is pretty straight forward - and the preview of AKS has significantly improved since I started using it. In this post I will cover: Ramp up with pre-requisites (Azure CLI, AKS…

This post will be an introduction to how you get up and running quickly with building a node.js API which runs through Express on node.js and communicates with a deployed MongoDB database, using TypeScript. Simply put: a MEAN stack application with typings. Oh, except Angular. Since I'm not building a UI yet, this post only has MEN out of the MEAN. MEAN is an opinionated fullstack javascript framework - which simplifies and accelerates web application development - mean.io There's plenty of ways to get up and running quickly with the MEAN stack. There's plentyful of yeoman generators…

In the past recent months I've been turning inside out on various parts of Azure, including the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and what it offers. If you're looking for the basics of getting started, please check out the other posts in this article series. Start here. Background I love how we can work with resources in Resource Groups, and keep them grouped for easy findability, configuration and manageability. One of the things I've been looking for is an automatic way to move resources between my resource groups. In this post we'll quickly check out how to do just that, using…

Introduction One of the tools I've used a LOT recently is the Azure Resource Explorer. This is a site which gives you a pretty thorough insight into what the Azure Resource Manager REST API endpoints looks like, and you can try them out live. A word of caution: This tool can create, read, update and delete (the full CRUD) in your subscription, if youre account allows it. This means I would suggest caution with what account you're signed in with, and which subscription/tenant you're selecting before trying it out! Azure Resource Explorer If you're keen on investigating the Azure…

Introduction Welcome to Part 3 in the Developing with Azure Resource Manager series. In the first part we took a look at what is required to set up the proper authentication in order for us to start developing with ARM. In this article we will take a look at how we can utilize C# and the new Microsoft.Azure.ResourceManager NuGet packages to abstract away all the REST API endpoints. The reason that I want to highlight the C# NuGet packages is that it is a lot easier to build an application using these wrapper classes for the API rather…

Introduction This is the second part in my series about Azure Resource Manager. In this post we will take a look at some of the AzureRm PowerShell cmdlets to get us started. This article is assuming that you've already followed the steps as lined out in Part 1, to set up your AAD Application and Service Principals and saved your credentials etc. Q: Why use a Service Principal rather than just a user/password from my normal account? A: If you want automation from CI/a service or you want to have your custom applications authenticate to your AAD and…